The starting point of this PhD research is two observations. The first is that people often tend to
discuss a country’s national competitiveness in a general tone, i.e., judging a country to be either
competitive or uncompetitive, rather than making more balanced assessment, and therefore their
opinions often contradict each other. The second observation is that there are many competing
international reports that rank a large number of countries in terms of their national competitiveness.
These reports often provide different rankings for a given country (e.g., China), and therefore the
readers of these reports are often left with a confusing picture. The first observation reflects the
reality that there has been a lack of commonly accepted definition of national competitiveness. The
second reflects the methodological problems of the indexing-and-ranking methods commonly used
by international competitiveness reports...